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A retired FBI agent on the Capitol grounds reported seeing a bus full of Antifa goons arriving at the Capitol and infiltrating the crowd. They were also using vans to unload bricks, etc. around DC last night, as the police stood by. Muriel Bowser gives them free rein.
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Being a cynic, I am saddened to see what happened at The Capitol, Wednesday, but those with a justified mission lamentably often stray and today they provided the mass media with an excuse to do what they do best - prove what hypocrites they are rather than balanced ombuds(men) or whatever nomenclature Liberals would have me use.
Is it acceptable to even posit that a peaceful protest was infiltrated by thugs? Are there those who want to destroy America capable of making sure such a protest would not succeed and end in failure?
As I noted previously, I was at a doctor's appt. and when I got home I did not put on the TV because I had tons of e mails to delete or respond to and a strong market to observe. Then I began to get a host of e mails from liberals alerting me to what was going on as they snidely reminded me why they hate Trump.
I have yet to hear much of what Trump said that allegedly formed the basis for those who accused him of inciting the riot.
Whether he did or did not, what happened marks a sad end to a record of remarkable achievements and any future luster he might deserve for that will be accompanied by an asterisk reminding us he was his own worst enemy and an undisciplined president.
One of my grandsons asked whether Jeb Bush would have been a better president and I responded from a personality standpoint for sure but none of the 16 or so 2016 Republican candidates could have accomplished what Trump did. Trump brought such a different unorthodox way of attacking unsolvable problems. He thought outside the box and was an impatient builder type who cut through unnecessary red tape. Ask veterans who now have better health care. Ask Israelis who have singed treaties with former enemies. Ask workers in plants that returned to America. Ask blacks who had jobs and the prospect of Opportunity Zone living conditions. Ask scientists at PFIZER whether they could believe they could work with government bureaucrats and be allowed to develop a vaccine in less than a year and have it approved and marketed. The mass media will yawn or seek reasons to find something to disparage but facts speak for themselves.
How sad for Trump to allow himself to do as Holman Jenkins writes - see below.
Trump Threw It Away
He stole an easily winnable election from himself with his lack of discipline.
Vice President Mike Pence made news by casting a semi-approving
look at GOP senators planning a symbolic challenge to Wednesday’s formal
counting of the electoral votes. Many voters still think the November election
was unfair, he said.
He could have added that saying an election was unfair is
tantamount to saying an election was held. Elections are unfair. Unfairness is
part of the fitness test. Campaigns lie about each other. The media plays
favorites. Partisans jigger the rules in their own favor. If Mr. Trump didn’t
find a way to prevail in the world we actually live in, the blame starts with
him.
Of course the microscopic margin rankles—he lost the pivotal electoral votes of Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin by fewer than 43,000 votes. He has every reason to be beside himself since he absurdly oversupplied these voters with reasons to vote against him and he still almost won.
Imagine a team so bad and good at the same time that it would
have prevailed if it had fumbled the ball 1% fewer times in its own end zone.
Any loser has grievances. Ask John Kerry. But Mr. Trump griping
about the media is like griping about his biggest asset. Having the right
enemies made him president in the first place and was poised to serve him even
better the second time around.
The Russia collusion scam? Shameful, but notice that it actually
played out rather brilliantly for him. Entering his third year in his office,
he could be seen beating back the most scurrilous attack on a modern president
ever, even as his administration’s policies were coming up roses for millions
of Americans. Do you think an Obama or Hillary or anyone named Bush would not
have employed some strategy, some discipline, to exploit this narrative and its
God-given opportunity to expand his base and win fence-sitters?
The pandemic? Mr. Trump was about as lucky as you can get when
it comes to such a piece of bad luck. It came in the fourth year of a
presidency that was going swimmingly for most Americans, including those most
left behind by the Obama economy.
It came from China, which, in a signal departure from his predecessors, Mr. Trump had portrayed as a threat that previous administrations had too long appeased. Any other campaign would have found the lemonade in these lemons with an approach that didn’t include a lot of dismissive and distracting ad-libbing by the commander in chief.
Even so, Mr. Trump came within a whisker of winning because it
turned out millions of Americans felt more threatened by the lockdowns than the
virus.
And when your opponent hands you a
gift like Hunter Biden, whose drug-fueled influence peddling, remember, was
first reported by mainstream institutions like the New York Times, ABC News and
the New Yorker, don’t turn the story back on yourself with a foolish and
unnecessary call to the Ukrainian president. Shut up. Let the media carry the
ball. Would Hillary have made this mistake? Did she put her fingerprints
anywhere near the Steele dossier? Of course not. And when Hunter’s laptop
surfaced, the mainstream press would have covered it because Hunter was
still their story.
Mr. Trump was the most known person ever to run for the
presidency; he spent 40 years advertising his gaucheries to the American
people. His outsider act was central to his appeal, but that hardly required
coming up short on political calculation, discipline and patience. Mr. Trump
plays checkers. The game is chess. His slim loss in the Electoral College
should rankle, all right, because it shows how different the outcome might have
been if he had done a few little things differently—including listen to advice.
But Mr. Trump was at it again on the eve of Georgia’s runoffs.
Its secretary of state has become a boogeyman on the right. If Republicans
didn’t instantly suspect Mr. Trump himself leaked the phone call, if they
didn’t realize he can be perfectly happy with the GOP losing the Senate as long
as his chosen narrative dominates, they still don’t know Trump.
Mr. Biden also happens to be one of the most known figures on
the national stage, though in a way that makes him of little interest to
anybody. The “Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes were telling. The only thing Democrats
valued about him was that he was alive. We’ll see what this means for his
presidency, but pay attention when a Ted Cruz or Ron Johnson, with eyes open,
risks his reputation to be on the right side of the Trump electorate.
I saw a strange sight zipping down I-80 in Pennsylvania the day
after Christmas. At the foot of an on-ramp, a sizable crowd was gathering along
with a half-dozen pickups, each flying a giant Trump banner and an American
flag. They were clearly forming up for a parade nearly two months after their
guy lost the election.
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Sent by a very dear friend and fellow memo reader:
Wish I had written this and probably have but it took me ten memos. This person did it in one.
FOOD FOR THE BRAIN!
Some things to think about!
I never dreamed that I would have to face the prospect of not living
in the United States of America, at least not the one I have known all
my life. I have never wished to live anywhere else. This is my home
and I was privileged to be born here.
But today I woke up and as I had my morning coffee, I realized that
everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I
say, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives are never
going to be the same. I have been confused by the hostility of family
and friends. I look at people I have known all my life--so hate-filled
that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I
think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone. We have become a
nation that has lost its collective mind!
You can't justify this insanity:
• If a guy pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.
• Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans
are in America.
• It was cool for Joe Biden to "blackmail" the President of Ukraine,
but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.
• Twenty is too young to drink a beer, but eighteen is old enough to vote.
• People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to
people who have never been slaves.
• People who have never been to college should pay the debts of
college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.
• Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better
be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.
• Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US
must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate
gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcome.
• $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion
for “free” health care is not.
• If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat
to get into the country you go to college for free.
• People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a
female President.
• We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems
like a great plan to us.
• Some people are held responsible for things that happened before
they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what
they are doing right now.
• Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping
them is bad because it's a violation of THEIR rights.
• And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us "racists"?!
Nothing makes sense anymore - no values, no morals, and no civility.
People are dying of a Chinese virus, but it's racist to refer to it as
Chinese even though it began in China. We are clearly living in an
upside down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral
is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good,
where killing murderers is wrong but killing unborn babies is AOK!
Wake up America, the great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an
iceberg, is taking on water, and is sinking fast. Speak up!
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Victor Hanson speaks:
Defenders of Civilization?
Our grandees seem too exhausted, too guilty, or too ignorant to pass on and improve the civilization they inherited for others to come.
The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.
What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.
Demonizing Our Past
In just a year, thousands of memorials and icons have vanished. Names have changed, words are banned. Careers were ruined. As new totalitarian rules were enshrined, old freedoms became despised.
Yet most of the country sat in lockdown quiet, as it was told that it, and its history, were toxic and culpable—and by whom exactly? Moralists like LeBron James? Steve Kerr? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Were Americans in their 244th year suddenly to write checks, apologize, and pay penance to their angry self-described moral superiors?
A few schools apparently are no longer to be named after Abraham Lincoln, the president who saved the Union, destroyed the slave-holding Confederacy, and freed the slaves at a cost of nearly 700,000 American lives. Now 155 years after his assassination, the present generation—the most leisured, entitled, and wealthiest cohort in civilization’s history—deems him unworthy and unfit for any commemoration. Do any of the street-brawling Antifa radicals seem tough guys in comparison to the Union troops at Gettysburg or those who marched with Sherman?
Who or what does the Left offer in place in Lincoln—Che? Fidel? Malcolm X? Cesar Chavez? Margaret Sanger? Xi Jinping? FDR? Barack Obama? All would fall well short of the alleged standards applied by cancel culture. So what are we left with other than nothing? Diversity Academy A? Equity High School No. 3? Inclusion College IV? Campus 1619?
What happens if one principal, just a single superintendent, a few parents, three board members say, “Nope, we are not erasing Lincoln’s name, no way, no how”?
Little need be said of increasing tense racial relations, given that the collective optimism of a year ago during the booming 2019 economy—record low minority unemployment and the undepreciated powers of assimilation and integration were beginning to make race more incidental than essential—has dissipated. That was then, and this is now after pandemic, lockdown, recession, George Floyd’s tragic death, riot and looting, a bitter election, and an ongoing cultural revolution.
Cornell University is now mandating flu shots for its on-campus students, but with allowances for nonwhites to petition for exemptions, in the manner of those pedigreed epidemiologists who all but said science should be ignored in ranking those to be vaccinated by their race. Had someone in 1980, 1990, or 2005 predicted such things, he would have been written off as a dystopian crackpot.
What happens if an elderly so-called white person dies of COVID-19, when a state medical policy ignores science and substitutes racial preference instead? Will his estate file a class action suit that the state has violated the Constitution and is culpable for needless death?
What Legal System?
Is there really a legal system any more, at least as we once knew it, in our major cities—New York, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles? Violent crime has soared. Murders are up 30-50 percent in many of those places.
In 2020, whether an arsonist, looter, or rioter was arrested, indicted, and jailed depended on the ideology of the perpetrator and the political context of the crime. Old ideas like “broken windows” preventative enforcement went down the memory hole. Did Rudolph Giuliani’s crime-reduction miracle in New York City ever really exist? Is it legal for a district attorney simply to announce that he will no longer enforce the legal code? Can victims of ensuing crimes sue such somnolent prosecutors?
Police forces operate under a “defunding” sword of Damocles amid a general collapse of spirit. Officers assume that if they arrest violent criminals, three things are likely to happen and all of them are likely deemed bad.
Either police can make an in-vain arrest in their no-bail, Soros-funded prosecuting attorney jurisdictions and see the arrested subject released, angry or defiant or both. Or they can risk being attacked or shot by emboldened criminals, given police deterrence has vanished. Or, in extremis, they can use force and find themselves charged with a felony and likely to have their careers ruined.
So police pull back, deterrence is lost, the elite rely on their money, influence, connections, and distance from the mayhem for their security. The poor and middle classes fend on the front lines as they can. Will the working classes establish their own security teams to police their neighborhoods? If they did, would that be vigilantism, or is vigilantism what the rich already practice with their armed guards who patrol their properties?
The homeless population of more than half-a-million seems to grow ever larger, as they line the boulevards of our major cities. How could a wealthier more sophisticated society of 2020, the greenest in world history, allow feces on its sidewalks, random harassment of its passersby, and garbage, and worse, strewn in its parks? Are there homeless outside the French Laundry restaurant? Do they camp at the curb outside Gavin Newsom’s mansions? Why could not our Silicon Valley multibillionaires endow a health campus, or Ivy League campuses translate their abstract caring into concrete welcoming of the homeless into their empty summertime dorms?
Americans know that purging the word “vagrant,” “liberating” the ill from mental asylums, and allowing public urination and defecation did not solve the problem. They sense they know the solution is the restoration of hospitals and health care halfway houses, but are too weary to hear the furious outcry.
Losing a Generation
The American university, once the global model of higher education, is in veritable shambles in ways that translate the value of its steep tuition reduced to laptop zooming.
There is no First Amendment on campus. The culture of the Salem Witch Trials applies: save yourself by going woke while going on the offensive to accuse others of witchcraft.
Administration has become a memo-writing contest, as both endangered and aspiring white males issue edicts condemning items in the news to illustrate their superior woke bona fides. Most pay as much attention to them as did the vandals to purple toga magistrates reading edicts to the wind in Rome circa fifth-century A.D.
We hope only that the firebreaks thrown up around the social sciences and humanities can prevent their infectious nihilism from crossing into the sciences and professional schools. What is most striking is the self-righteousness of the university faculty, administration, and students, despite their collective culpability for the current chaos.
Statue topplers were taught to hate dead white males, but never taught about the particular historical, literary, or cultural contexts that fuel their deductive hate. Is spray painting easier than reading?
All the ingredients for civilizational stasis—delayed or nonexistent marriage and child-bearing, massive unsustainable student debt, ideological indoctrination without learning, and superficial credentialing—originate in the university.
And yet no one in academia steps forward to offer ways to slash costs, or to promise the campus will guarantee its own student loans, or to take some responsibility for the current demographic, financial, and ideological crisis of our twentysomething lost generation, as it stagnates in prolonged adolescence. Can we at least have the university endowment substitute for the federal government as the last guarantor of student loans?
The media has proven deadly but not serious. Few believed in the “Russian collusion” yarn; all assumed its weaponizing of the original Christopher Steele/Hillary Clinton/Fusion GPS mythography was to paralyze the Trump Administration.
All knew that Trump was far harder on Russia than his predecessor. And none cared. The Ukrainian hysteria that led to impeachment—like the Brett Kavanaugh hit and like the news blackout of Biden Inc.—did the country terrible damage, but again was so farcical that even the purveyors of the lies knew that their charges were not serious.
Now after they have destroyed their credibility and lost the trust of the American people, what is next for the media? We are left with a bad version of a Ministry of Truth, as supposed muckrakers and young Zolas vie with each other to find out what color socks or which flavor milkshake “President-elect” Biden prefers. Like Pravda that often translated Leonid Brezhnev’s incoherent mutterings into truth speak, so too after January we will be reminded that an often incoherent Biden is really Cicero.
Importing and Nurturing Ingratitude and Decline
There are more immigrants in the United States than at any time in its history. More arrive here each year, legally or illegally, than to any other nation. And they do so not for the New Green Deal or abortion on demand. Instead, as mostly minorities, they expect to find more freedom, economic prosperity, meritocracy, and personal safety in America than they did as majorities in their home nations. Do they know, but cannot say, that?
Yet we are hellbent on transmogrifying the immigrant experience into one in which the newly arrived must lodge complaints against their hosts, as if we are to assume they chose to immigrate to what they didn’t like and to abandon what they did. What happened to requiring every immigrant to have familiarity with English, a high school diploma, and legal entry? Does anyone believe such requirements would make newcomers less successful? Or is the rub that they would arrive more independent, more upbeat about America, and less inclined to be patronized—and therefore not so needed by the Left?
Some days decline is ascendent. On Sunday, I drove through Fresno on Highway 41. The landscaping on the berms of both sides has become a veritable homeless village of the desperate and forgotten. Oddly, some abodes were subterranean, as the homeless, in World War I fashion, had dug under trees to pitch tents over their burrows.
Last night, walking through our almond orchard, a truck was parked on the alleyway, the driver standing outside with an automatic rifle. I had no idea whether he was working for a neighbor to shoot squirrels, or the renegade who shoots doves that sometimes drop wounded or dead in our yard, or the one who shot the majestic red-tail hawk who rotted for weeks on a power pole transformer with a bullet in him. The stranger was polite and put the gun down, but spoke no English as I walked on by with four dogs. Does Nancy Pelosi encounter such people in her environs?
In between these two incidents I read the local news, with its daily fare of gang shootings, and fatal drunk-driving wrecks—both are way up in the San Joaquin Valley in 2020. During this lockdown, there are the now-familiar details that the lethal driver was out without bail or had a host of prior DUIs—the equivalent of mere traffic tickets in 2020. There seems a new boldness too in the modus operandi of speeders, drunks, and criminals ramming police cars when purportedly pulling over.
Not long ago when two young women were having sex in the back of their car parked in the orchard, then gave me the finger when I walked by, and then spun out and sped away, it was deemed a calm day—no drug injectors, no trash tossers, no stolen car strippers.
Searching for Common Denominators in Our Malaise
Is there some common denominator in our malaise? A look back at Athens 340 B.C., or Rome 440 A.D., or Constantinople 1440, or France 1940? Perhaps.
Is the culprit an estranged elite of the keep—wealthy enough to ensure that the consequences of its own toxic ideology fall only upon others?
Our grandees seem too exhausted, too guilty, or too ignorant to pass on and improve the civilization they inherited for others to come. Instead, the elite justifies its leisure, privilege, and affluence by medieval penance, virtue signaling and offering confessionals about their own “unearned” white privilege. It is strange to see the Volvo brigade of our most privileged Americans on the metaphorical barricades, as if they are the real revolutionaries who fuel BLM and Antifa.
Why do $20,000 refrigerators, trying to torch a federal courthouse, and spitting in a policeman’s face all seem to have something vaguely in common? Revolutions with ensuing chaos usually follow from the professional and upper-classes joining the mob, either in expectation their solidarity will earn exemption, or as a lark out of boredom, or in ignorance about the venom of those who destroy monuments and burn, or in furor their own upward mobility did not quite land them among the most chosen of the elite.
For now we wait for one local PTA member to refuse to change the name of his Lincoln school, or a crusading prosecutor who issues 40 federal racketeering indictments the next time Antifa drives in to town to take over a house, torch a courthouse, or reclaim a street, or a judge who sentences a violent arsonist to a 20-year sentence pour encourager les autres, or an exasperated college dean who will say no to segregating dorms or no-go zones by race, or one honest journalist who finally presses Joe Biden to answer what have Hunter and his family done.
About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).
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